Now that the Grand Prix season has begun in Europe and teams can work from their home bases we should see some interesting strides forwards in the mechanical scene in the paddock. For the first three races everyone was "on tour" leading a gypsy-like existence which made it impossible to do much in the way of serious development. The craze of the moment to develop ways of cheating the "no-skirt"...

Lotus: The Martini Team Lotus produced a brand new car for Andretti, Lotus 79/5 (or ML 23 by the factory’s odd numbering!) to exactly the same specification as the previous cars, and presumably put together during breaks from finishing off the first Lotus 80. Reutemann still had Lotus 79/2 and Andretti’s previous car 79/4 was the team spare. All three carried the name ESSEX on the sides, the name...

Ligiers in formation
Sao Paulo, February 4th
Two weeks after the Grand Prix season opened at Buenos Aires, the Formula One teams moved north to the spectacular 4.946-mile Interlagos circuit at Sao Paulo to where the Brazilian Grand Prix returned this year after being held at Rio-de-Janeiro for the first time in 1978. For the motor racing enthusiast there is no comparison between the two...

Lotus:
Gone are the sleek black and gold creations from Hethel, they are now green with yellow lining. Gone too is the fatuous title "John Player Special", they are now "Martini-Lotus" (though Motor Sport has never considered a Lotus anything other than a Lotus). The reason for these changes is the end of the financial support from the John Player tobacco firm, after a long and successful...

-- Ferrari fight backZolder, April 29th
When the Belgian Grand Prix returned to the Spa-Francorchamps circuit last year, everyone was delighted and full of enthusiasm for a real Grand Prix de Belgique and the general feeling was that there need be no further discussion; the Belgian race was back at its rightful home and there it would stay. However, those who thought that overlooked one small...

With the Belgian GP and the San Marino GP on successive weekends (April 29th and May 6th) there was precious little time for anyone to return to base between the races so most of the teams set off for Belgium with sufficient equipment for the two weeks. Europe based teams like Ferrari were at a big advantage and the Maranello team were back home by Monday lunch-time after the Belgian race the...

Formula One Circuits From Above
Bruce Jones
In principle the idea is excellent: tap into the miracle of Google Earth to provide satellite imagery of the world’s classic racetracks, with explanatory footnotes detailing the finer points of each corner and scattered paragraphs outlining the great, the good and the successes they achieved locally.
In parts this works well, but “legendary” seems an...

Rose-tinted spectacles are a wonderful invention, but they don’t always focus accurately. Modern life, then, is not necessarily rubbish…
Writer Andrew Frankel
Although it probably didn’t seem so at the time, as the grid assembled in Melbourne for the first Grand Prix of the new millennium, the world of Formula 1 was a somewhat simple place to be, at least relative to where it is today.
The cars...

Huge advances in safety corresponded with real-world political and financial machinations that would change motor racing forever. And it can all be traced back to one terrible Sunday afternoon
Writer Andrew Benson
Everything changed on the afternoon of May 1, 1994. When Ayrton Senna’s Williams hit the wall at Imola’s Tamburello corner, and the great Brazilian was killed by a suspension arm...

Once dismissed by Enzo Ferrari as a science for those who didn’t understand engines, aerodynamics proved to be manna for those who understood racing cars…Writer Adam Cooper
This was a period of tumultuous change for Formula 1– and the greatest developments came in the field of aerodynamics. Just consider the arc of evolution between the Lotus 49B, which Emerson Fittipaldi raced at Brands Hatch in...